The "life-changing" secret inside the center of Peter Molyneux's gigantic, curious cube has been revealed, and it will make one lucky teenager into a videogame god.
The legendary British game designer has been watching for six months as millions of players chipped away at the 25 billion cubelets that composed his app called Curiosity. All along, he has teased his players, promising that the person to smash the final cube would win a prize that is "life-changing in any measurable way." Earlier this month, Molyneux told Wired that even his own wife and children didn't know what awaited the winner.
This morning, an 18-year-old named Bryan Henderson from Edinburgh, Scotland, destroyed the last cube.
"People are going to hate me for this," Henderson told Wired in a phone interview, "but I only registered for the game earlier this morning, about an hour before I won the thing."
Henderson's reward is related to Molyneux's upcoming game Godus, a "god game" in which players rule over their own worlds. But today, we learned that everyone playing the game will have an all-powerful god ruling over them: Bryan Henderson.
Henderson will work alongside 22cans to introduce his own rules and "morals" into the game, affecting all other players, said Molyneux in the – video that Henderson saw when he finished the game. 22cans later released the video to YouTube. It said also that Henderson will also get a fiscal reward: "Every time people spend money on Godus, [the winner] will get a small piece of that pie."
Henderson, for his part, is totally baffled as to what any of this means, and is having trouble comprehending how he beat out so many other people. 22Cans told Wired that at the exact moment that the last piece of the Curiosity cube was destroyed, there were 30,000 players working on it simultaneously.
Henderson says that he never spent money on the game, and was simply tapping casually when he cracked the final cubelet. He'd found a lone patch, and for nearly 10 minutes after clearing it all out didn't realize that he'd won.
If Godus goes on to become a big hit, Henderson may find himself becoming wealthy. Molyneux, for his part, says that 22Cans will follow up with exact details on the monetary reward, but promised in the reveal video that "you will accrue riches from that game, from the start to the finish of your reign."
"I don't think I understood that as much as I should have," Henderson says. "But I think I've realized that it's gonna be a bit."
Molyneux was equally vague on the limits on the powers Henderson will have. What kind of god will Henderson be? If he has the ability to do evil against others, will he use that power?
"I think now and again I'll definitely take advantage of it," says Henderson.
This is something that has never been done before in a videogame: The fate of an entire community of players will be contingent upon the whims of a single person. As Godus evolves after its release, an entire world of players may come to develop relationships with Henderson based on his control over them. Will he be loved, or hated? How much of this will spill over into Henderson's personal life?
Only after Godus is released will we be able to determine the veracity of Molyneux's claims. Today very well may be the day that Bryan Henderson's life was changed forever, in every measurable way, as Molyneux said.
"My mom is ecstatic," Henderson says. "She's probably more excited than I am."
